A Country Haunted by Starvation Burns Its Food

Russian workers throw peaches off a truck outside the city of Novozybkov.

Photograph by AFP/Getty

A hundred and fourteen tons of pork were annihilated in the Russian city of Samara, on the Volga River. The pork, which had been imported using Brazilian documents, was revealed to have come from the European Union. More than two hundred tons of other food followed—cheese in Orenburg, pork in St. Petersburg, nectarines and tomatoes in the Leningrad Region.

None of this is a joke. All of it has been reported in the last couple of weeks by what passes for reputable media in Russia—that is, sources that publish news that the Kremlin wants people to know. It was the Kremlin that initiated the food slaughter in the first place. To start, on July 29th President Vladimir Putin signed a decree ordering the destruction of all foodstuffs brought to Russia in violation of sanctions that the country has imposed on imports from the European Union and several other Western countries, which have themselves subjected Russia to economic sanctions. The counter-sanctions, imposed a year ago, appeared designed to deliver a dual message—“We didn't need your food in the first place” and “Russia will only win by eating what it produces”—and the new measures seem intended to reinforce the message of Russia's resolve against the continuing onslaught of banned food from the enemies. On July 31st, the Russian cabinet published official rules dictating that banned food should be destroyed “by any available means” in the presence of two impartial witnesses and that the process must be captured in photographs or on video. During the next few days, more and more chilling details emerged: when the decree took effect, on August 6th, food would be destroyed by incineration—including, possibly, by mobile crematoriums—compacting, and burial. And then it was.

A government plan to destroy hundreds of tons of food would probably be bizarre in any country, but Russia's relationship to food is particularly troubling. The entire history of the twentieth century in Russia is possibly best told through a chronology of hunger. There were the post-Revolutionary manmade famines that killed millions in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and what is now Russia. The famine designed by Stalin was followed by one invented by Hitler: the single most traumatic and best remembered narrative of the Second World War in Russia comes from the Siege of Leningrad, during which hundreds of thousands died of starvation. The postwar years in the Soviet Union were hungry. A brief period when most people seemed to have enough to eat followed, only to give way to the crippling food shortages of the nineteen-seventies and the rations introduced in the late eighties. Then came the hell for many people that was the nineties, with its multitude experiences of hunger. Some people remember the utterly barren store shelves in 1991. Others recall the salary arrears of the mid- and late nineties, when state-enterprise workers would not see payments for many months at a time and the lucky ones lived off their land allotments, where they planted potatoes.

Then there were the unlucky ones. In 1999, I interviewed squatters who were living in a dilapidated building in the Far East; they had come there from a nearby village in search of food. Prior to moving, they, like the rest of the people in their village, had spent a month eating supplies salvaged off a ship that had wrecked nearby. A young woman said that her sister had lost a two-month-old baby after she had given him powdered milk from the ship. She had no breast milk because she was so malnourished. If any of my interlocutors at the time are still alive, they are among the majority of Russians of all ages who have personal experience living with hunger or the immediate risk of hunger. Since the beginning of this century, Russia has experienced unprecedented prosperity, but the memory and threat of hunger is less than a generation away.

The flipside of this legacy is, or has been, a reverence for food with which every Soviet and post-Soviet child was reared. Disposing of uneaten food—even letting food go bad so that it has to be discarded—has been seen as something akin to a crime. And now Putin, whose own mother nearly died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad, has ordered that food be destroyed. To be sure, it is enemy food, and it can also be perceived as rich people's food. But it is still almost undeniably edible. The obscene nature of the proposal is underscored by the videotaping requirement. It was apparently intended as an anti-corruption measure, to keep officials from seizing food in order to resell it, but the idea—and the videos that have emerged since the decree took effect—comes off as luridly voyeuristic.

There are some signs that Russians are taken aback by the idea of destroying food. Several hundred thousand people have signed a petition calling on the government to give the banned products to the poor, and a few officials have even expressed support for the idea. (It's not clear, though, what kind of anti-corruption measure could be applied in this case, short of requiring that the poor be videotaped consuming the contraband.) But the outrage seems to have remained on paper—or onscreen. Official media outlets, meanwhile, have reported that the decree is working: illegal importation of banned goods has already fallen in response to the new measure. The leading national tabloid has rallied behind a proposal to turn seized food into animal feed: “Let's feed overseas pork to our pigs!” If the media succeeds in selling the idea of food incineration to the Russian public, that would mean that there is no idea too crazy, too frightening, or too disgusting for the Kremlin to make the law of the land.